Usually, to teleport from one grid to another, users type a hypergrid address into the Map’s search box, an address which looks like this: hg.hyperica.com:8022.

But if the hypergrid address leads to a region on the same grid that the user is currently on, the teleport fails. So, for example, a user standing on My Region on the Kitely grid and tries to teleport to Another Region on Kitely by entering the address hg.kitely.com:8002:Another Region will fail — he would have to type just the region name.

Kitely has fixed this bug so that users can now teleport to a hypergrid address even if the destination is on the same grid.

“This is a problem because our World Pages show the hypergrid address of worlds, so it’s natural for users to try to enter it into the World Map,” said Oren Hurvitz, co-founder and VP R&D of Kitely, in today’s announcement.

Kitely will eventually donate this code back to the OpenSim community, Kitely CEO Ilan Tochner told Hypergrid Business, but it won’t happen right away.

“It is currently entangled with our own proprietary systems so it will take some time until we can contribute a generic patch that can work with any OpenSim grid,” he said.

Once the fix is donated, it will do more than make life easier for hypergrid travelers — it will also make it simpler to script hypergates. Right now, gates need to do a check to see if a particular address is a hypergrid address or a local address, and adjust accordingly.

Other fixes and improvements

The most obvious change was the redesigned home page, which now better reflects what Kitely is about.

In other changes, buyers of products delivered to other grid can now review those products, whereas previously they could only review products delivered to their Kitely avatars.

In another hypergrid-related fix, the “Home” menu command now works while on foreign grids, and takes Kitely residents back to Kitely. If their “Home” position hadn’t been set yet, they’re taken to the Kitely Welcome Center.

Maria Korolov is editor and publisher of Hypergrid Business. She has been a journalist for more than twenty years and has worked for the Chicago Tribune, Reuters, and Computerworld and has reported from over a dozen countries, including Russia and China.